The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
him. Why, Captain, honey, ain't ye hungry?"
This was addressed to a man with several bruises on his forehead, and an
enormous flaxen mustache, as soft in texture as a child's hair--a man
wearing delicate boots with high Flemish leggings, that curled over and
showed full women's hose of red, over which were buckled trousers of
buff corduroy, covering his thighs only, and fastened above his hips by
a belt of hide. His shirt was of blue figured stuff, and his loose,
unbuttoned coat was a kind of sailor's jacket of tarnished black velvet.
He hung a broad slouched hat of a yellowish-drab color, soft, like all
his clothing, upon a peg in the wall, and bowed to Hulda first with a
smile of welcome, to Madame Cannon cavalierly, and to Levin with a
graceful reserve that attracted the boy's attention from the notorious
woman at he head of the table, and held him interested during all the
meal.
"Pretty Hulda, I salute you! Patty, _buenos dias!_ I hope I see you
well, friend!"--the last to Levin.
As he took up his knife and fork Levin observed a ring, with a pure
white diamond in it, flash upon the Captain's hand. He was a blue-eyed
man, with a blush and a lisp at once, as of one shy, but at times he
would look straight and bold at some one of the group, and then he
seemed to lose his delicacy and become coarse and cold. One such look he
gave at Hulda, who bowed her eyes before it, and looked at him but
little again.
To Levin this man had the greatest fascination, partly from his
extraordinary dress--like costumes Levin had seen at the theatre in
Baltimore, where the pirates on the stage wore a jacket and open shirt
and belt similar in cut though not in material--and partly from his
countenance, in which was something very familiar to the boy, though he
racked his memory in vain for the time and place. The stranger was
hardly more than forty to forty-five years of age, but the mistress of
the house treated him with all the blandishments of a husband.
"Dear Captain! pore honey!" she said; "to have his beautiful yaller hair
tored out by the nigger hawk! Honey, he fell onto me, and I thought a
bull had butted me in the stummick."
"He broke no limbs, Patty," the captain lisped, feeding himself in a
dainty way--and Levin observed that his fork was silver, and his knife
was a clasp-knife with a silver handle, that he had taken from his
pocket--"_Chis! chis!_ if he had snapped my arm, the caravan must have
gone without me to-night. I am sore, though, for Senor was a valiant
wrestler."
"He'll git his pay, honey, when they sot him to work in Georgey an' flog
him right smart, an' we spend the price of him fur punch. He, he! lovey
lad!"
"I took this from him to-day when I searched him carefully," the captain
said, handing Patty Cannon a piece of silver coin.
The woman, though she looked to be little more than fifty years of age,
drew out spectacles of silver from an old leather case, and putting them
on, spelled out the coin:
"George--three--eighteen--eighteen hunderd-and-fifteen!"
She threw up her head so quickly that the spectacles dropped from her
nose, and Hulda caught them, and then Mrs. Cannon turned on Hulda with a
ferocious expression and snatched the spectacles from her hand.
"Whar did the devil git it?" Patty Cannon asked.
"Ah! who knows?" the Captain lisped with pale nonchalance, giving one of
those strong, piercing looks he sometimes afforded, right into the
hostess's eyes. "It might be a coincidence: _chis! chito!_ A shilling of
a certain year is no rare thing. But, Madame Cannon, it becomes slightly
curious when six such shillings, all numbered with that significant
year, came out of the same pocket!"
With this he passed five shillings of the same appearance over to the
hostess, and she put on her spectacles again and looked at them all, and
dropped them in her lap with a weary yet frightened expression, and
muttered:
"Van Dorn, who kin he be?"
"That is of less consequence, my dear, than whether we can afford to
sell him."
The Captain was now looking at Hulda with the same strong intentness,
but her eyes were in her plate; and, though Madame Cannon looked at her,
too, with both interest and dislike, Hulda quietly ate on, unconscious
of their regard.
"Shoo!" the woman said; "people kin scare theirselves every day if they
mind to. We've got him, and, if he knows anything, it's all in that
nigger noddle. So eat and be derned!"
"My guardian angel," the Captain remarked, with a blush and a stronger
lisp, "you may not have observed that I have never ceased to eat, while
you immediately lost your appetite. What will you do with the
shillings?"
Mrs. Cannon took them from her lap, and rose as if she meant to throw
them out of the window, her angry face bearing that interpretation.
"Stop, remarkable woman," the Captain said, pulling his soft, flaxen
mustache with the diamond-flashing hand, "let your fecund resources stop
and counsel, for I am only looking to your happiness, that has so
abundantly blessed my life and banished every superstition from my heart
till I believe in neither ghosts, nor God, nor devil, while you believe
in all of them, and give yourself many such unnecessary friends and
intruders. _Chito! chito!_ as the Cubans say, and hear my suggestion
before you throw away those shillings!"
"Take care how you mock me!" cried Patty Cannon, with her dark, bold
eyes furtive, like one both angered and troubled, and her ruddy cheeks
full of cloudy blood.
"Sit down! Give the shillings to pretty Hulda there."
"To her?"
"_Ya, ya!_ to pleasing Hulda; for what will trouble us then, her sinless
bosom being their safe depository, and her long-lashed eyes melting our
ghosts to gray air?"
With a look of strong dislike, the woman gave Hulda the shillings,
saying:
"If you ever show one of 'em to me, gal, I'll make you swaller it."
Hulda took the silver pieces and looked at them a moment with girlish
delight:
"Oh, grandma, how kind you are! Why do you speak so mad at me when you
give me these pretty things? They seem almost warm in my bosom as I put
them there, like things with life. Let me kiss you for them!"
She rose from the chair and approached the mistress of the house, who
sat in a strange terror, not forbidding the embrace, yet almost
shuddering as Hulda stooped and pressed her pure young lips to the
blanched and dissipated face of Patty Cannon.
The Captain looked at the kiss with his peculiar strong, cold look, and
smiled at Hulda graciously and said:
"There, ladies, repose in each other's confidence! A few shillings for
such a kiss is shameful pay, Aunt Patty. Do you remember as well as I
do, Madame Cannon, that once you missed some money, and thought your
mother had stolen it, and hunted everywhere for it, and it never came to
light?"
"Yes," cried Patty Cannon, "I do," and swore a man's oath.
"Has the Senor been in that direction, do you think? I think he has, for
Melson and Milman are up from Twiford's with the news that Zeke's last
hide has burst her chain and fled, and all the lower Nanticoke gives no
trace of her, and Zeke has passed the heavenly gates."
The Captain drew the back of his silver clasp-knife across his throat,
smilingly, and placed on the table a sailor's sheath-knife.
"Zeke only was untied; it was a too generous omission," he said. "The
Philadelphia woman the Senor says he set free, and that she has gone to
start an alarm against us. The Senor is a cool man: he told me that, and
laughed and roared, and says he will live to see us all in a
picture-frame. _Ayme, ayme_, Patty!"
With her face growing longer and longer, the woman heard these scarcely
intelligible sentences--wholly unintelligible to the younger people--and
to Levin it seemed that she grew suddenly old and yet older, till her
cheeks, but lately blooming, seemed dead and wrinkled, and, from
maintaining the appearance of hardly fifty, and fair at that, she now
looked to be more than sixty years of age, and sad and helpless.
"Van Dorn, I'm dying," she muttered, as her eyes glazed, and she settled
down in her chair like a lump of dough.
"_Ha! O hala hala_! hands off, fair Hulda," the Captain cried,
joyfully, as Hulda had been moved to relieve the poor old woman; "no one
shall assist at these ceremonies of expiation but Van Dorn himself,
whose rights in Mistress Cannon are of priority. She's dropsical, and
hastening to perdition too soon, which I must arrest and let her comfort
me still more. Sweet comforter! Young gentleman, you shall help me."
Levin took hold of Patty Cannon's feet and found that she seemed made of
bone, so tough were her sinews, and Van Dorn easily lifted her broad
shoulders, and so she was laid on a bed in the next room, where the
elegant Captain was seen rubbing her limbs, and even handling a bottle
of leeches, one of which he allowed to crawl over the hand that wore the
diamond, making it look like a ruby melting or in living motion. As this
voracious blood-lover took his fill around the straight ankles of the
hostess, the dainty Captain held her in his arms like an ardent lover.
"Honey," sighed the woman, "my rent is due, and Jake Cannon never waits.
Take Huldy and this yer new recruit, my cousin Levin Cannon, an' drive
'em to the ferry,--an' watch that boy, Van Dorn: I want him broke in!
Give him a pistol and a knife, an' have him cut somebody. Put the
blood-mark on him and he's ours."
"Great woman!" the Captain lisped, prolific of his kisses, "Maria
Theresa! Semiramis! Agrippina! Cleopatra! ever fecund in great ideas and
growing youthful by nightshade, _alto! quedo!_ but I love thee!"
"Am I young a little yit, honey?" asked Patty Cannon. "Oh, don't deceive
me, Van Dorn! Can my eyes look love an' hate, like old times?"
"_Si! quiza!_ More and more, dark angel, entering into black age like
torches in a cave, I see your deep eyes flame; but never do they please
me, Patty, as when they flash on some new wicked idea, like this of
marking the boy for life. Who is he?"
"He's a Cannon, one of the stock that my Delaware man belonged to. His
mother looked down on me fur coming in their family: I have remembered
her."
"You want your young cousin made a felon, then?"
"Yes, honey, I want him scorched, so the devil will know him fur his
own."
The Captain reached down to the lady's feet and pulled off the leech and
held it up against his hollow palm, gorged with the blood of the fair
patient.
"See, Patty! The boy shall drink blood like this, till, drunk with it,
he can hold on no more, and drops into our fate as in this vial."
As he spoke he let the leech fall in the bottle, where its reflection in
the glass seemed to splash blood.
"Ha, ha! Van Dorn, I love you!" the woman cried, and smothered him with
caresses.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CANNON'S FERRY.
When it was announced to Levin and Hulda, who had meantime been talking
in the garden, dangerously near the subject of love, that they were to
be given a ride to Cannon's Ferry with Captain Van Dorn, at the especial
desire of Aunt Patty Cannon--who also sent them a handful of half-cents
to spend--they were both delighted, though Hulda said:
"Dear Levin, if it was only ourselves going for good, how happy we might
be! I could live with your beautiful mother and work for her, and,
knowing me to be always there, you would bring your money home instead
of wasting it."
"Can't we do so some way?" asked Levin. "Oh, I wish I had some sense! I
wish Jimmy Phoebus was yer, Huldy, to take me out thair in the garden
an' whip me like my father. But, if I hadn't come yer, how could I have
seen you, Huldy?"
"How could I have spent such a heavenly night of peace and hope if you
had not come, dear? The Good Being must have led you to me."